Hacom is another heavy supporter of pfSense and while I have no personal first-hand experience with their gear, a number of pfSense commercial support customers have used it with complete success.  Definitely another recommended vendor.

I have been working on the exact same project. I ordered a Maxsun MS-D510 board off of ebay (came form hong kong). It has a GB port onboard but it is not intel. I tested it with PFS and it worked fine but you should still consider adding an intel nic to use instead. This board has 2 PCI slots and a PCIe slot. I am going to add a dual port Intel GB PCIe card when I find one cheap. I popped a regular intel 100m card in one of the PCI slots and put a Linksys WMP54G PCI wireless card (its on the accepted hardware list for PFS) in the other PCI slot. I got the WAN, LAN, and DHCP working fine but I have yet to get the wireless working. I don't want to spend the money on the PCIE nic until I get wi-fi sorted out. If I can't then I will just have to add an external WAP. Good luck with your build. Bob

The lack of DMA for disks should not cause you any problems, I've certainly run firewalls that way before without issue. As for ACPI, why would it be a recommended step in troubleshooting boot processes if disabling it would cause the OS to fail to run?

Mine worked fiine with the console.  I have a X500 with flash card in it.  Had to cut the utility bill down to two wireless ap and that's it.  i love to be running the x-500 but being out on short term disabaliaty you have to cut where you can. RC

I finally caught some of the spike.  And it's PHP and Perl.  Not very helpful. :(

I bought a new nic TP-Link TL-WN651G  and it works great. thanks for the time and support.

Sounds like you are not specifying a drive at all. Just specify the drive name after fdisk. The system startup will show the drives on the system as in the following: ad0: 955MB <transcend 20071207="">at ata0-master UDMA33 . . . ad2: 955MB <transcend 20071207="">at ata1-master UDMA33 (I have two 1GB Transcend DOM "hard drives" on my system and they are named /dev/ad0 and /dev/ad2.) I suggest you get to shell command mode and type the command: dmesg | grep ad which will display the startup output which includes the character string ad Here's what it produces on my system: dmesg | grep ad FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation. padlock0: No ACE support. agp0: Invalid aperture setting 0x0agp0: Invalid aperture setting 0x0agp0: bad aperture size ath0: Ethernet address: 00:19:e0:68:31:4b ath0: mac 7.9 phy 4.5 radio 5.6 rl0: Ethernet address: 00:30:18:b0:50:fb uhub0: <via 1="" 9="" uhci="" root="" hub,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 1.00="" 1.00,="" addr="">on usb0 uhub1: <via 1="" 9="" uhci="" root="" hub,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 1.00="" 1.00,="" addr="">on usb1 uhub2: <via 1="" 9="" uhci="" root="" hub,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 1.00="" 1.00,="" addr="">on usb2 uhub3: <via 1="" 9="" ehci="" root="" hub,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 2.00="" 1.00,="" addr="">on usb3 rum0: <ralink 0="" 2="" 802.11="" bg="" wlan,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 2.00="" 0.01,="" addr="">on uhub3 rum0: Ethernet address: 00:1b:11:b5:c1:c8 vr0: Ethernet address: 00:30:18:b0:19:48 udav0: <shantou 0="" 2="" st268="" usb="" nic,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 1.10="" 1.01,="" addr="">on uhub0 udav0: Ethernet address 00:60:6e:30:32:26 udav0: Ethernet address: 00:60:6e:30:32:26 ad0: DMA limited to UDMA33, device found non-ATA66 cable ad0: FAILURE - SET_MULTI status=51 <ready,dsc,error>error=4 <aborted>ad0: 955MB <transcend 20071207="">at ata0-master UDMA33 ad2: DMA limited to UDMA33, device found non-ATA66 cable ad2: FAILURE - SET_MULTI status=51 <ready,dsc,error>error=4 <aborted>ad2: 955MB <transcend 20071207="">at ata1-master UDMA33 Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a bridge0: Ethernet address: 92:a5:c3:d6:8d:2f bridge0: Ethernet address: 36:0f:23:1a:bd:cf</transcend></aborted></ready,dsc,error></transcend></aborted></ready,dsc,error></shantou></ralink></via></via></via></via> Then you will know the valid parameter values to the fdisk command; on my system fdisk /dev/ad0 or fdisk /dev/ad2</transcend></transcend>

New box is online :) Unfortunately, there's a problem with the second WAN link [ISP issue], so I'll do the load balancing later. [image: Pic-5.png]

right, probably just the cable is faulty, just played a bit with the connectors and suddenly it appeared as gigabit connection… Thanks anyway. :)

I believe the reference to 'A' and 'B' just means that the 24 ports are split into 2 groups of 12 ports (if they're board mounted connectors, this allows a hybrid of different CAT standards or Shielded/ Unshielded configurations by switching out one of the boards). That is, group 'A' has 12 ports and group 'B' has 12 ports.  It shouldn't be a reference to the TIA/EIA wiring scheme.

@jasonlitka: Unless you get "lucky" and have a really bad stick, MemTest86+ is really only useful if run 48-72 hours.  I've had quite a few "unstable" systems that will run for the better part of a weekend with dozens of passes without an error and then suddenly throw up hundreds at once. That is if you run all the tests in a row.  Looping #3 and #5 alone will throw out errors rapidly on bad sticks of memory.  The other tests take a long time to check for other system faults. For other hardware failure (aside from mem. controller and ram), it's better to use Prime (Orthos), IBT or OCCT.

@dataminerz: I am interested in buying the machine. Do you still have it. http://www.dataminerz.com/index.php Well my email is in the post.

@wallabybob: I don't understand the basis for this remark. The re devices report using different IRQs (16 and 17) and then report they are using MSI (Message Signalled Interrupts) which should give them distinct interrupts. My mistake. I just assumed that the switched devices share the IRQ there because that is what I've encountered when using similar setups albeit with a Intel PT Dual port (with the extra PCIe lanes taped up to force x1 mode) on the 945GC chipset.

Is there any reason you don't want to use pfsense from within esxi? In my own environment, I expose only pfsense to the network, and have pfsense and my virtual machine communicate on a virtual interface that is not bridged to a hardware network device.  It works extremely well.

I'm firing this topic back up again to see if the landscape has changed. Has anyone come up with an inexpensive pfSense compatible box (approx ALIX speed or better) that has a 4-port integrated LAN switch?  I'm still at a point where it is difficult to recommend pfSense to my friends who only need 3 or 4 PC's plugged in without using a separate switch.  dd-wrt usually fills that void, but it's impossible to upgrade remotely.

Theres one but i think its for the Drives, but its listed besides the network under "onboard chipsets" etc. Marvell IDE Enchance afaik it affects the p-ata interfaces not the network. But it do affect then ethernets somehow i think…. or its just my imagination. When its enabled, it ALWAYS panics without cables connected. Also, it dosn't disable any of the 10 sata drives, or the ide slot. When i push it to disable the gateway boots if msk0 have an attached cable. With no cables connected, same with enable/disable. So booting works with IDE disabled, and 1 cable connected but not with any use on them. Also connecting MSK0 to MSK1 is making the same as no cable... i assume they dont notice, or hate each other. But i havent been pushing any load on it, cause im abit afraid it will panic and dont want to boot, and im waiting for any ideas... I really do not think its the hardware i've pushed alot of traffic trought it on win2k8 and win7. Also, i've checked the asus page for bios updates as some of these network cards has been delivered with broken firmware, theres some like always for "enchanced memory support", "new stepping" etc but nothing that i can see concerns this.   **Got anyting for me to try, i'll do it!  **

any update from y'all?